Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: In Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think, economist Bryan Caplan (2011) sees the preoccupation of many parents today with doing everything they can for their children as simply an irrational response.He reasons: "Adoption and twin research provides strong evidence that parents barely affect their children's prospects.If parents gave themselves a big break-or redoubled their effortskids would turn out about the same" (2011: 4).We can debate Caplan's claims.What is less open to discussion is that multiple factors shape children during the process of socialization.This goes for writing scholarly articles, too.It's a collective enterprise.At the risk of overusing the childrearing metaphor we could say that multiple perspectives and engagement with them help little essays grow up to become better articles.I have had wonderful help in alloparenting 1 my British Journal of Sociology Annual Lecture to its greater potential from a stellar group of colleagues, Alya Guseva, Allison Pugh, Aliya Rao and Frederick Wherry, who have each contributed their unique perspectives and talents, and all have pushed me to think further and better.They raised many questions, only some of which I have the space to address here, with hopes that the dialog on these topics continues at other opportunities and in other venues.To recap, I argue in my BJS article that we have witnessed a marked shift from "childrearing expenditures" to "parenting investments" that align with new visions of what it means to be a child and what it means to be a parent.Extending Nigel Dodd's inquiry into the social life of money to family economy, I proposed that the social life of money for children has become oriented to human capital development of children and invested parenting identities.Using the theoretical lens of economic entanglement, or how the entanglement of structural, political and cultural forces scaffolds the economy, I discussed the role of financialization, parenting books and services industry, and an aloof state offloading provision for children onto individual parents.Leading entangled economic lives, parents engage in relational work (Bandelj,
Source: British Journal of Sociology
Author: Nina Bandelj
Institution: University of California, Irvine
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,840
OpenAlex ID: W4407852978